Addendum: Lost in Translation

May 18, 2017

The platitudinous Italian apothegm, “traduttore, traditore” (‘translator, traitor’ = ‘to translate is to betray’ [the original]), applies in spades to the Russian poem in the preceding post (Constantine Shapiro, Selected Writings, 2nd, expanded ed., [Book Surge Publishing: Charleston, S. C., 2008], p. 181). One crucially distorted element of the original is the last line, the last (rhyme) word in particular, щит ‘shield’. The “shield of truth” is salient because this phrase encompasses much of the addressee’s haecceity. In the Russian, the word at stake occurs in rhyme position, whereas in the English translation it does not. The positional purport of the original poetic diction is thereby lamentably lost in translation.